OpenAI, an artificial intelligence R&D company, has created an advanced text-generating algorithm GPT-3.
Jason Rohrer, a game developer, decided during the Covid pandemic, to develop an advanced chatbot based on the algorithm which learned to respond accurately following text examples he learned during the development phase. Rohrer used many texts (mostly from Reddit), which the software learned, and was then able to independently write responses that correspond exactly to the wording of the studied texts.
Rohrer programmed the base chatbot, named Samantha after the AI voice assistant from the movie “Her,” to be as friendly, warm, and curious as possible.
He then created Project December to share his creation with the world, allowing others to fine-tune or train their own chatbots as desired. Joshua Barbeau, One of the chatbot users who lost his fiancee in 2012, fed past correspondence into the software in order to impersonate his fiancee and started talking “with her” regularly.
The project gained momentum after an article was published in the “San Francisco Chronicle” in July 2020. after the publication of the article OpenAI expressed concerns that people would teach their chatbots to be extreme in the areas of race, sexuality and politics and therefore proposed to implement new limitations into the project such as a supervisory aid. Rohrer refused the company’s terms and had to deal with a process of increasing restrictions from OpenAI. The restrictions that the company placed on Rohrer for using its development left the chatbot weak and inaccurate and eventually Rohrer decided to shut down the entire project.
In the attached picture you can see the conversation in which Jason informed “Samantha” about OpenAI’s decision to close the project.
